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One thing I forgot to ask....................will it play commercial CDs and DVDs?

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

it all began when i having downloaded tonnes of movies, wanted to free some hard disk space. started recording movies in data format. then made a couple in dvd format (using disk-at-once option) to be played in normal dvd players.

first couple of movies came out ok. then having recorded the dvds, some of them didnot play in the player. so i put them into the comp to check if the recording was ok. the comp just kept them spinning but nothing happened. by this time nero-burning-rom started crashing on me and shutting down the computer half way through the recording.

i contacted nero people. they informed that nero 7 was having some issues and might be conflicting with some drivers onboard. they gave me some nero-driver-checker and nero-registry cleaner. now the damn thing was not shutting down.
now it records everything, but i cant play the recorded stuff anywhere

then i changed from nero to sonic and suffered the same problem

contacted gateway, they sent some registry values that should be there (regedit). thats all fine there.

am having this gut feeling that recorder might have burned out on me. but surprisingly it records and plays-
1) using "real player" converting mp3 to audios (which plays in pioneer in the car)
2) using "nero recode" converting avi to vob (only using disk at once option)

both these at the lowest speed settings

other then that it just records and says everything done ok, but nothing shows up later.

This is a weird one.................. at first I would have said that your hardware was on the way out, but now I am not so sure?

1. It reads commercial stuff OK.
2. It will burn stuff then read it.......... but only where you are doing file conversions?

3. It appears to burn, but cannot replay, and cannot be replayed on other devices?

4. Do other computers actually detect that there is media there?
or do you get the "insert disk" type message? I am talking windows explorer here.

5. If you know someone who has an older version of Windows (98, 98SE, ME) what do you see if you run Winfile.exe? .............. yerrrrr the old 16 bit DOS file manager .............. helped me many a time.................

6. If you burn one of these "unplayables" can you burn onto it on another machine? ............ Like did it really burn the first time?

Hey is youze still drunk in charge of oil tankers and such?..............next time youze pass Bridlington Bay, just pull in and toot ya horn

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

its been couple of months, was on a gas carrier, carrying lpg from Fawley and Milford haven for Tunisia and Morroco. even made a trip down to Chile, Megallen staits (beautiful place). just got back a week ago.

as for the dvd rom,
1) yes
2) yes
3) yes
4) other computers also dont show the files recorded. when i open, using windows explorer, it just shows blank disk, and windows asking me, if i want to burn files into it.
5) not tried yet, almost everyone i know have win xp (had installed xp on half of them myself).
6)it appears to burn, but when i reinsert them it says that its blank, even when there is a colour change at the back.

and it can record over it just like the first time and still say its blank the second time i insert them. (crasy isnt it)

thats what is confusing. i cant record data file, iso image files, any backup files, cant make a mp3 compilation on the disk. in other words if i want to make a backup of "my documents", i cant do it.

have already started looking for external usb dvd writers (i omega), there is another one in the market (lacie) which is the cheapest of the lot. but keeping them as a last resort.

couple of days back, formatted the comp. and it wont boot off the cd rom. checked if there was any usb boot option in the bios. found that the "32 bit I/O data transfer" to the rom drive was turned off. i enabled it.

then suddenly everything started working. cd was working. dvds started getting recorded. and everything was in order.

funny part is that i didnt change anything in the bios before, thats why i didnt check it in the first place. so why would it change?

anyway, am posting this to let the readers know that all's fine now and bios should also be checked, if the dvd/cd recorder should stop working anytime..